How Is Asdl And Other Internet Access In Bangkok These Days?

[somefellow]

I'm going to be moving to Bangkok in September. Having fast, reliable internet is crucial for my business. I last lived in Bangkok in 2006, and the quality of internet service was quite poor. I had 3 different ADSL lines, two from true and one from another provider, and some times all 3 lines were really slow...

Well now it's 3 years later, I'm hoping things have improved... does anyone have experience with ADSL in bangkok lately? What download speeds can one expect from international sites? I will want to have very fast (>1 mbit, prefer > 2 mbit) connectivity, with very reliable uptime.... I'm willing to pay for a dedicated leased line if necessary.

Are things doing better on the bandwidth front these days? Would anyone have a particular service provider to recommend, even expensive leased line services, I need to investigate and am willing to pay whatever is necessary to have fast, reliable international connectivity.

Thanks-

[rheinwiese]

I'm going to be moving to Bangkok in September. Having fast, reliable internet is crucial for my business. I last lived in Bangkok in 2006, and the quality of internet service was quite poor. I had 3 different ADSL lines, two from true and one from another provider, and some times all 3 lines were really slow...

Well now it's 3 years later, I'm hoping things have improved... does anyone have experience with ADSL in bangkok lately? What download speeds can one expect from international sites? I will want to have very fast (>1 mbit, prefer > 2 mbit) connectivity, with very reliable uptime.... I'm willing to pay for a dedicated leased line if necessary.

Are things doing better on the bandwidth front these days? Would anyone have a particular service provider to recommend, even expensive leased line services, I need to investigate and am willing to pay whatever is necessary to have fast, reliable international connectivity.

Thanks-

Better change your destination if you need speed and reliability.

Internet here is a mess.

Sometimes it works ok, sometimes is simply out.

And this can last a few days.

The ISP's cap the bandwidth on international sites.

And high speed up-and downloads? Nope.

Check out the forum.

You find plenty of infos and very annoyed posts.

[Crushdepth]

I'm getting good speed out of CSLoxinfo at the moment, 2.3 MB fairly consistently. But it slows down or drops out when it rains hard (which is probably not their fault).

[somefellow]

Crushdepth - What package do you have from csloxinfo and how much does it cost? I may wind up getting 2-3 phone lines each with a separate DSL.

Rheinwiese - My wife is thai and we have a child, we have been living in the US but are moving back to Bangkok soon... so changing my destination can't be an option. On the other hand, I am willing to face reality and do whatever is necessary, pay 40,000 baht a month, 80,000 baht a month, whatever it takes to get fast, highly reliable internet connectivity to international sites.... dont wanna have to shell out that much but I have no option as I will have no income if I dont have proper internet

[webfact]

I'm going to be moving to Bangkok in September. Having fast, reliable internet is crucial for my business. I last lived in Bangkok in 2006, and the quality of internet service was quite poor. I had 3 different ADSL lines, two from true and one from another provider, and some times all 3 lines were really slow...

Well now it's 3 years later, I'm hoping things have improved... does anyone have experience with ADSL in bangkok lately? What download speeds can one expect from international sites? I will want to have very fast (>1 mbit, prefer > 2 mbit) connectivity, with very reliable uptime.... I'm willing to pay for a dedicated leased line if necessary.

Are things doing better on the bandwidth front these days? Would anyone have a particular service provider to recommend, even expensive leased line services, I need to investigate and am willing to pay whatever is necessary to have fast, reliable international connectivity.

Thanks-

Sign-up for a SME package. I trust every provider will offer such packages.

Its more expensive but keeps you out of the "home user pool" which is overcrowded!

You won't have much fun with that. Search this forum and you can read stories about bandwidth and providers. From +++ experiences to --- horror stories - you will find all.

I recommend CSloxinfo too.

Edited June 19, 2009 by webfact

[Crushdepth]

Crushdepth - What package do you have from csloxinfo and how much does it cost? I may wind up getting 2-3 phone lines each with a separate DSL.

I'm on a 3MB home package, cost is 1,230 baht per month. So I can tell you that CSLoxinfo at least has the bandwidth to deliver most of what they promise (unlike some other providers - see recent threads). However, there's still a lot of luck involved - I think quite a lot depends on how close your house is to an exchange. Try to get the shortest contract you can in the first instance so you can get out if it doesn't work out for you.

[somefellow]

Crushdepth - What package do you have from csloxinfo and how much does it cost? I may wind up getting 2-3 phone lines each with a separate DSL.

I'm on a 3MB home package, cost is 1,230 baht per month. So I can tell you that CSLoxinfo at least has the bandwidth to deliver most of what they promise (unlike some other providers - see recent threads). However, there's still a lot of luck involved - I think quite a lot depends on how close your house is to an exchange. Try to get the shortest contract you can in the first instance so you can get out if it doesn't work out for you.

Crushdepth - can you tell me what kinds of download speads you get from US speed test sites during the day?

Last time I was in thailand I had 2 TRUE and 1 KSC internet line --- sometimes all 3 were really slow even though all 3 were SME packages : (.

This was 3 years ago, though..... hopefully better now

[livinthailandos]

Dear Somefellow

have read your posting, am curious if its not confidential or asking to much what kind of business are you doing that requires high internet speed. right now I am using maxnet (tt&t) with premier up to 2M, how much download speed are you requring, how much upload speeding are you requiring. Alot of things I download I use a download manager or wget sometimes. Watching video has been fine, not to many areas of high buffering. Just so you have some idea

I've been able to download a 1GB .iso in about 1 hour.

[monty]

Internet has improved a lot over the last few years in Thailand.

Invariably the people complaining on speed and reliability are on the cheap home packages.

The prices on the better packages (less contention ratio) have come down a lot. I have Maxnet Premier 3 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up, get 80% of rated speed pretty much always and is steady as a rock. Costs 2090 Baht/month + Vat.

They do have technical glitches every so often, and unfortunately they sometimes can take a while to get solved.

If both speed and reliability are of very high importance, I would advise you to find a location where you can get internet from two different ISP's and on two different physical lines (i.e. 2 different phone lines).

Then go for the SME packages.

In Bkk for example Maxnet (where they deliver internet through a dedicated line, at the moment at not too many locations yet), along with Csloxinfo, True or another big ISP (for which you'll need a phoneline).

3 Mbps proper (not "home" packages should cost between 2,000 and 3500 Baht/month.

Then hook it all up to a load balancing/fail over router and you'll have fast and virtually 100% guaranteed internet access at a cost of between 5000 and 6000 Baht/month.

Nowhere near the high price range you indicate, and better then the most expensive business package money can buy in Thailand, as you are never relying one 1 single provider!

[HardenedSoul]

I recently binned TOT's abysmal 2MB "service" in favour of KSC's 4MB Lite offering. I get everything I pay for. Speedtest.net test between BKK and LA, NYC and London all as promised. Costs 2,490THB + VAT per month but I've not had a single reason for complaint in the 4 months I've had it.

Edited June 21, 2009 by HardenedSoul

[Crushdepth]

Crushdepth - can you tell me what kinds of download speads you get from US speed test sites during the day?

I'm not really sure who is US based or not. If you give me a couple of URLs you want to use as reference sites I'll be happy to post the results here. But downloading off my own server in Chicago I'm getting about 150 kB/s at the moment. Downloading from a fast server (podcast from media.grc.com) I get slightly over 300 kB/s.

[guava]

I'm on a residential/consumer 2500/512 ADSL plan with True for around 1100THB a month. Speed is close to advertised 80+% of the time, around the clock. On occasion the speed is less than half what it should be, but reliability is much better than it has been in the past - for me anyway. I no longer curse it on a daily basis. I don't think the (over) subscriber ratio is as high as it has been in the past.

I can pretty much saturate my allocated bandwidth (up and down) with popular BitTorrent downloads, even without connecting to any local peers. I generally try not to out of respect for others on the network, and a need for accessible bandwidth myself. I have no download quota or speed caps etc, so in that respect it's a reasonably good value plan. I think True have 8MB ADSL consumer plans now.

On the US based Speakeasy Speed Test or other similar speed test sites I typically get between 2500 and 3000 down, 350-450 up. Interestingly, I got a bit of a speed jump around 3-6 months ago.

Prior to that I'd never get much over 2500-2600. I've not seen anything that explains why this may be. I don't know how much better (or worse) people get on faster plans, through different providers, or in other locations around Bangkok, and around Thailand.

http://speedtest.net/global.php will give you a fair idea of how Thailand and Thai ISPs stack up compared to other countries. We're miles behind Singapore, light years behind Japan and Korea, etc.

Thailand still lacks sufficient international bandwidth, and there are the usual issues of greed (from the former PM down through to the Thai and Singaporean owners of the mobile networks), licensing/regulators, politics, ineptitude, and general lack of vision. Thailand will be one of the last SE Asian nations to get wireless broadband - Crappy GPRS/EDGE is still pretty much as good as it gets here. The standard answer seems to be "There's no demand for it", to which I'd say "How the hel_l would do they know?"

The global economic meltdown and the pending LTE (4G) standard may mean Thai providers will hold off on HSDPA or any 3G rollout, WiMAX, etc indefinitely now, despite the ongoing fluffy press releases. Scores of promises have been broken to date...

[filingaccount]

Right now I am using both TOT and True.

TOT 2.0/0.5 Mbps package

True 8.0/0.5 Mbps package

Comparing the two (excluding torrents) places True ahead simply because they offer 8 Mbps and gives maybe 2.5 Mbps 24/7 whereas TOT's 2 Mbps generally gives about 300 Kbps.

True's connection also does not suffer from severe bugs as TOT. Eg. TOT now interrupts downloads randomly and severs connections frequently making downloads impossible without a download manager, and also making online streaming (radio and TV) fairly useless.

I will of course test True thoroughly during the 2 weeks of Wimbledon. So far, however, True has been much better than TOT when it comes to streaming online media.

Ping times seems to be quite stable at 350-450 ms to the US and about 75-100 ms higher to Europe.

Comparing torrent downloads in percentage of the maximum package speed gives True an small edge on both download and upload.

TOT gives me 155-160 KB/s download (theoretical maximum 256 KB/s minus overhead). About 65% or so of max.

True gives me 900-910 KB/s download (theoretical max 1024 KB/s minus overhead). About 85% or so of max.

Upload is of course slow on both connections, but True generally gives me a maximum of 47 KB/s and TOT 33 KB/s (same torrents, same trackers, etc).

Prices.

TOT apparently now offers the 2.0/0.5 Mbps package at 590 baht per month. I still pay ~1000 Baht because I do not want to be tied up for another year with them. (I can cancel with them without penalty and recover the phone line deposit in a month.)

True offers the 8.0/0.5 Mbps package at 1199 Baht. (requires another service by True. I have a prepaid True Move sim with call forwarding, and it works fine with a 49 baht sim, 50 baht refill. Call forwarding to another True number is 1bht/min and other mobile networks 1.5bht/min).

[somefellow]

Wow guys thanks for all the info. It really does sound like things are a lot better than before. I have a great load balancing router, which I plan to use. I will just be paranoid and go for 3 phone lines.

I used to have 2 TRUE lines and one KSC line. The speeds you guys are mentioning from the US are unbelievable. My lines were rated at 2 MB, but the fastest I ever saw was around 1700, usually they were less than 1 megabit, and usually around noon or so, they would all drop to about 200-300 kbps, I suppose businesses were using a lot of bandwidth at that time. I was paying about 4000 for each of them at that time.... ouch.

I feel a lot better given some of the statistics you guys have posted.... it seems like it is actually possible to get a fast internet connection to the US these days. The ping time seems slow, may interfere with VOIP. But I was used to high latency when I was in thailand last, anyway, in 2006.

Maxnet seems like an interesting idea, I will look into that.

This is also a bit of good news I came across in a different forum post lately, this should help things out as well:

http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=446497

Asia America Gateway cable system operational in Aug - PLDT

By Cris Larano, Dow Jones Newswires Wednesday 17 June 2009

New cable system will link South East Asia and U.S., avoiding areas prone to natural disasters.

The 20,000-kilometer long Asia America Gateway - a high-bandwidth fiber optic submarine cable system - will be operational in August, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. said Wednesday.

PLDT, a member of the AAG consortium - the international group that owns the submarine cable system, said terminal stations comprising the project have been completed. The terminal stations span Brunei, Guam, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and the U.S. mainland.

[somefellow]

Does anyone know how to find out how far a given location in BKK is from a phone exchange? That is, something like postal code checker? I've been googling and found some postal code checkers for other countries, but not bangkok. I haven't started to look for housing yet, but I think it will be a good idea to get something as close as possible to the phone exchanges, to minimize distance of the copper lines for DSL.